14th June 2008, 11:21 AM
Vulpes,
'Not sure of the details' doesn't justify why a presumption that all the archaeology on a pipeline has been located and resolved.
There is no policy of a watching brief on all pipeline activities but commonly there is. Justifiable and timely can only amount to one decent archaeologist with eyes in their head. It isn't a great expense on the grand scale of pipelines and will surely contribute to adding more information to the SMR.
Watching briefs on trenching is a very good check to the effectiveness of the geophysics, eval and excavations, and lessons can be learned for future projects.
I know of a great deal of archaeology located in trenches, sometimes whole sites which were simply not detected by geophysics or seen during during topsoil stripping because they were too difficult to see either because they were hidden within the sub-soil or because not enough topsoil was removed by the main contractor.
Another common mistake is the assumption that because there are no records of archaeology in the area that only a watching brief on the topsoil stripping will suffice; this is probably the worst strategy in that there are perfectly decent reasons why archaeology has not been found such as its under coluvium, soliflux, the area has been subsoiled, archaeology has been ploughed-out, covered by flooding episodes or even still being utilised today, such as field boundaries, trackways, roads, for example. Not locating features such as these denies an understanding of the archaeoloigcal process as well as the archaeology.
In my experience, its generally there but you have to look to find it rather than not looking at all.
'Not sure of the details' doesn't justify why a presumption that all the archaeology on a pipeline has been located and resolved.
There is no policy of a watching brief on all pipeline activities but commonly there is. Justifiable and timely can only amount to one decent archaeologist with eyes in their head. It isn't a great expense on the grand scale of pipelines and will surely contribute to adding more information to the SMR.
Watching briefs on trenching is a very good check to the effectiveness of the geophysics, eval and excavations, and lessons can be learned for future projects.
I know of a great deal of archaeology located in trenches, sometimes whole sites which were simply not detected by geophysics or seen during during topsoil stripping because they were too difficult to see either because they were hidden within the sub-soil or because not enough topsoil was removed by the main contractor.
Another common mistake is the assumption that because there are no records of archaeology in the area that only a watching brief on the topsoil stripping will suffice; this is probably the worst strategy in that there are perfectly decent reasons why archaeology has not been found such as its under coluvium, soliflux, the area has been subsoiled, archaeology has been ploughed-out, covered by flooding episodes or even still being utilised today, such as field boundaries, trackways, roads, for example. Not locating features such as these denies an understanding of the archaeoloigcal process as well as the archaeology.
In my experience, its generally there but you have to look to find it rather than not looking at all.